Outdoor Storytelling

Over the last year, as part of the English-based school curriculum in his school in the Cayman Islands, my 14-year-old son has been studying WW2 history, and specifically the D-Day landings. Last week I took him and his brothers there to learn more. I chose a tour with Dale Booth, who has a self-avowed “insatiable hunger for, knowledge of both the D Day landings and the many inland battles of Normandy”.

In our full day with Dale, he took us to a number of sites from the D-Day landings, and at each point stopped and shared the history.

The photo above is of Dale explaining to a group about the “widerstandnesten”, the “resistance nests” of multi-layered fortifications that the German army built and put in pace, some as long as 700m along the beachfront and including artillery batteries, machine gun nests, and of course barbed wire and mines.

It was a powerful experience for Dale to stand on Sword Beach with us explaining about the widerstandnesten. As with the photo above, he told this story while drawing a map of the fortifications with a stick in the sand. He then brought out his ever-present large scale folder of photos, showing us using landmarks such as house and sea walls photos of the invasion day etc.

As if that experience were not experiential and visceral enough, what was even more powerful was that at each location he…